REVISTA DAP AVENTURA 2014-2015

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Aventura al fin del mundo 2014 - 2015 THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE CHILEAN FOREST He was only 22 years old and the youngest member of the crews of the Erebus and the Terror, - British ships that undertook one of the last large naval exploration efforts (sailing from Tasmania in September of 1839). He could hardly have guessed at how those four years of sailing would affect his life and legacy. This young man was Joseph Dalton Hooker. Thanks to this voyage, whose destinations included Antarctica, Tierra del Fuego, Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, where he conducted extensive botanical collections, a tremendous body of work was produced as part of the thenbustling British scientific industry in the middle of the 19th century. Some of the results of this journey were published in a work of six volumes called The Botany of the Antarctic Voyage. In the second part of this work, entitled Flora Novae Zealandiae (1853), he described 1767 plants and put forth the first recorded explanation of the floristic similarities among continents of the southern hemisphere that are now so far apart. Hooker saw evidence in these disjointed patterns of a common origin, in an ancestral land mass. In those times his controversial theories ran up against a number of detractors, including Darwin, who maintained that this discontinuous distribution of related organisms in South America, Tasmania, Australia, and New Zealand belonged to long-distance migratory patterns that began in the Northern Hemisphere. Nothofagus: key or unsolved puzzle? Nothofagus, a group of 36 species of tree and bushes, has been considered one of the key genera of angiosperms to shed some light on the evolutionary and migratory patterns of the Southern Hemisphere biota. Nothofagus (Family Nothofagaceae) actually has ten species in Chile, which dominate the wooded landscapes of the austral region of South America, commonly known as oak, coihue, lenga, ñirre, raulí, ruil, and hualo. Nothofagaceae would have arrived or diversified on the Antarctic Peninsula during the Lower Campanian (about 80 million years ago) with other components of the current Sub Antarctic forests, together with remnants of the extinct Cretaceous flora. All of this has brought about the need to look closely into the origin and distribution of Nothofagus. There are a great number of phylogeneticists who support the theory of long-distance transoceanic dispersion, which after 160 years still challenges those who consider this genus to be the symbol of the patterns of distribution inherited from the breakup of Gondwana. The high degree of exclusivity of Antarctic flora during the Cretaceous offers no support (at least during the Lower Campanian- Maastrichtian interval, approximately 80 to 68 million years ago) to the existence of terrestrial bridges between these land masses. The land bridges between Patagonia and the Antarctic Peninsula are considered critical for the dispersal of plants and terrestrial animals, a condition now closely related with a drastic drop in the sea levels, the atmospheric CO 2 concentration and the fall in the global temperature. These climatic conditions, together with the mountainous terrain resulting from orographic precipitation, high CO2 levels and proximity to the volcanic arc, moderation of extreme temperatures and rainfall distributed throughout the year, have brought about ideal conditions for the rapid establishment and growth of a particular type of forest. The assemblage originated in the Antarctic Peninsula could be considered the predecessor of the modern Patagonian forests. New arguments have recently expanded the debate over the origins and the persistence of this southern temperate biota, indeed the Valdivian forest and the mixed-forest eco-region on the west coast of southernmost South America, primarily in Chile and western Argentina. A recent campaign was conducted by a group of researchers from the INACH Paleobiology Laboratory for Patagonia and Antarctica, the University of Heidelberg, the Universidad de Chile and the Chilean Museum of Natural History, working from the Las Chinas valley to the northern sector of the Chilean province of Última Esperanza. The discoveries included the first finding of dinosaur fossils in the Magallanes region, and underlying these was a layer with a large number of fossil plant imprints with at least ten angiosperm morphs and two different types of Nothofagus. As a result, the ancestral origins of the Southern South America forests have a new date: the end of the Maastrichtian (66 million years ago) giving direct evidence that during at least the last million years of the age of dinosaurs there were Nothofagus and several accompanying elements, crossing the bridge among both continents. The dispersal capacity of the Nothofagus’ fruits is extremely restricted and its germination viability is short in time, as well as its seeds cannot disperse even across short saltwater barriers. Thus, leaves provide good evidence for the existence of a land corridor to Antarctica. This corridor would also be supported by the finding of an alleged hadrosaur tooth in Antarctica. More than 160 years and the publication of a thousand or so scientific papers on the subject, the thesis first proposed by Joseph Dalton Hooker remains very much alive. Acknowledgments: A special thanks to the personnel at Estancia Cerro Guido, to INACH, and to the FONDECYT projects 11080223, DAAD-CONICYT 259- 2010 and BMBF CHL10A/09. Dr. Marcelo Leppe Cartes INACH  mleppe@inach.cl 46 Adventure at the End of the World
Aventura al fin del mundo 2014 - 2015 Antes de llegar a Punta Arenas: EL RICO PASADO HISTÓRICO DE RÍO SECO Su antiguo frigorífico y los restos de su muelle son los íconos de un pasado próspero en que se desarrollaron masivas exportaciones de carne. Al acercarse a Punta Arenas por la ruta 9 Norte y antes del kilómetro 14 destaca un poblado llamado Río Seco. A más de algún visitante cuando llega por primera vez le han dicho que ese es Punta Arenas. Sin embargo, ese poblado que destaca por la diversidad de casas y por muchas parcelas que se han ido estableciendo, encierra un pasado histórico que se forjó en los inicios de la ciudad a comienzos del siglo XX. En el pasado Río Seco fue un lugar de descanso para aquellos que salían de Punta Arenas rumbo a la Patagonia argentina o iban a Puerto Natales. Un sector que encierra ese pasado histórico es el situado en el llamado camino antiguo que por años fue de ripio y hoy está pavimentado. Allí destacan la antigua construcción del primer frigorífico de la región de Magallanes que hoy está convertido en una bodega a medio usar y los restos del antiguo muelle de Río Seco, situado al otro lado del camino frente del frigorífico. El frigorífico, que operó desde 1905 hasta 1964, fue construido y operado por la South American Export Syndicate Ltda. Los equipos fueron importados desde Inglaterra, al igual que los primeros funcionarios que trabajaron en este frigorífico. Llegaron a trabajar más de 300 personas siendo de los más importantes de la Patagonia, con un promedio de faenamiento anual que superaba los 230 mil animales. Hasta el muelle llegaban los barcos, conocidos también como “caponeros”, los que llevaban la carne de exportación, las menudencias, grasas y cueros, al mercado europeo, especialmente a Inglaterra. Ernestina Velásquez Berríos, viuda desde 1968, ocho hijos y más de una treintena de nietos, es una de las vecinas más antiguas de Río Seco que recuerda vívidamente el apogeo del frigorífico porque su fallecido esposo, Remigio Levinieri, trabajó en aquel establecimiento. “Los barcos caponeros fondeaban y la carne era embarcada en lanchas que estaban en el muelle y éstas navegaban hacia el barco que estaba cerca del muelle para cargar la carne. Los corderos faenados iban congelados y envueltos en bolsas”, relata. “Eran buenos tiempos porque dos veces a la semana el frigorífico vendía carne a los pobladores y los precios eran ventajosos. El auge más grande de Río Seco estuvo enlazado con el funcionamiento del frigorífico. Después de eso ha venido el decaimiento”, admite doña Ernestina. Adventure at the End of the World 47
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REVISTA DAP AVENTURA 2014-2015

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